Posts Tagged ‘feminism’

I write this blog because I want to give birth in the presence of beauty. I chose to write under the pseudonym Diotima because in all philosophy she is, I think, the greatest spokeswoman for female creativity, that is, giving birth. I also love Plato, and think his radical engagement with gender should be a model of open-mindedness for people living 2,500 years on, who really have No Bloody Excuse not to do as well as he did, if not better.

I may sometimes give birth to wind eggs, instead of real philosophical children. If I do so, I ask that all reading this blog serve as proper midwives. I will undoubtedly love my baby too much to give it up voluntarily, and I will need guidance, sometimes firm guidance, in order to see the error of my ways and the flaw in my creation.

Off the internet, I am an eighteen-year-old student at St John’s College. I hope one day to be a doctor, and am thinking particularly of entering the field of epidemiology. I am a woman, white and American, and I am a member of the middle class. I am someone with enormous privilege, and I grapple with the ethical ramifications of that privilege every day.

I am a feminist, and I strive to be an anti-racist ally. I have been influenced by many people, both people I know, people whose books I have read, and people with whom I have talked over the internet. Writers formative to my growing consciousness as a radical are Susan Brownmiller, Catherine MacKinnon, bell hooks, W.E.B. Dubois, Betty Friedan, Cornel West, Audre Lord, Claude McKay, Booker T. Washington, Mary Wollstonecraft, and especially Kate Millet, whose book Sexual Politics changed my life in a profound way.

On the internet, I am indebted to the tutelage I received first and foremost at the livejournal feminist community, at the livejournal community debunkingwhite, and from livejournal posters stoneself, karnythia, sabonasi, cumaeansybil, and shemale. Elsewhere online I have read consistently and with interest the blogs Feministing, I Blame the Patriarchy, Angry Black Woman, Bitch Ph.D., Female Law Professors, and, until recently, Pandagon.

I have written in the past via the livejournal handle tabari, which I have used extensively elsewhere online. As the nickname is fundamentally one of my childhood, I have chosen to move past it. I only learned after adopting the nickname as my userhandle that it is also an Arabic name of long standing, and I am nervous about people misapprehending me as an Arab and perhaps a Muslim when in fact I am a secular humanist living in a Christian culture. I’d rather not deal with the possible problems of appropriation and misunderstanding that might arise.